RE: [asa] Re: Slug

Phil raises a valid point:
 
>>I find your arguments unpersuasive but will withhold judgement until I
read something more thorough. They are unpersuasive because it seems
you are making an etymological fallacy -- that a word's meaning is
determined by its etymology. While /raquia^/ apparently does hail from
ANE cosmology in which the world is capped with a hard sphere, it seems
to me that the Bible authors did not mean for its usage to imply that.
Remember the ANE cosmologies must have been very ancient, but Moses was
writing at a relatively recent date. It's hard to imagine that the
Hebrews who depended on rain for agriculture (unlike the mesopotamians)
would really believe that clouds were coming through gates in a hard
sphere at such a late date, after they had sojourned in Egypt and become
the cosmopolitan people that they really were! The usage of phrases
like "open the floodgates of heaven" don't make your case because these
kinds of phrases are common in languages like English as holdovers from
ancient cosmologies and cannot tell us what the speaker actually
believes.<<
 
Having stuck my head in ANE literature recently, you can see words
change through time and especially when Noah's grandsons form their own
families with their own dialect of Accadian, which among the Jews,
became Hebrew. Remember, we are taking about hundreds of years and many
generations as words and phrases adopt new meanings adapting with
subsequent generations. You can watch goddesses go from mother to
sister to lover and spouse as new authors use their own imaginations and
think up new stories about existing deities. Kings become gods and
serpent deities. So even if the ancients thought of the sky as solid
and I can't think of any rational for that, seven planets were known to
wander about which would be hard to fathom in a solid sky, that doesn't
mean the more modern Hebrews suffered the same delusion even when they
use commonly-accepted cosmological terms. Then to use that as a
platform example to devalue the entire Old Testament is entirely off
base.
 
>>By the way, the writer of Genesis 1 could have used on Day 4 the
normal word for sun (which is used 120 times in the OT), or the normal
word for moon (which is used some 20 times), but instead he chose to use
a word that is NEVER applied to those concepts anywhere in the entire
remainder of the Bible. The word he used has many applications in the
Bible, most or all of them phenomenological. He was only discussing the
phenomena of distinct lights in the sky, to fit the parallelism with Day
1, not the ontology of the actual objects in the sky. Again, I would
suggest that the Hebrews were smarter than the credit we smug moderns
give them, and that they might have noticed the curved shadows on the
moon and concluded that it was a solid object, not a disk attached to a
dome. Since he was discussing lights on Days 1 and 4, not solid
objects, he avoided use of the words that he knew referred to the
objects, and chose to use a word that meant phenomena of lights,
instead. There is no teaching of cosmology in this.<<
 
Day Four does indeed refer to the sun, moon and stars which were used
then and are still used today for signs and seasons. Babylonian kings
became gods and gods became astral bodies and resided in constellations,
and constellations marked seasons. Ishtar/Inanna was associated with
the planet Venus who seasonally disappears to search for her departed
Tummuz/Dumuzi who dies in mid-summer when vegetation withers. The stars
were an important part of Babylonian theology. On Day Four, God himself
appointed them as signs and seasons for the sighted creatures who come
later. There is nothing in the Hebrew that should cause us to believe
that God "created" the heavenly bodies on Day Four. The creation of
"heaven" which is everything in it, sun moon and stars included, was on
Day One.
 
Quoting Gleason Archer:
 
Verse 16 should not be understood as indicating the creation of the
heavenly
bodies for the first time on the fourth creative day; rather it informs
us that
the sun, moon, and stars created on Day One as the source of light had
been
placed in their appointed places by God with a view to their eventually
functioning as indicators of time ('signs, seasons, days, years') to
terrestrial
observers. The Hebrew verb 'wayya 'as' in v. 16 should better be
rendered
'Now [God] had made the two great luminaries, etc.,' rather than as
simple
past tense, [God] made. - Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties, 62.
 
I keep telling you guys this and it goes ignored because it is a
lynchpin rationale for rearranging the days of creation.
 
Dick Fischer
Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
 <http://www.genesisproclaimed.org> www.genesisproclaimed.org
 
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Philtill@aol.com
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 2:16 AM
To: dfsiemensjr@juno.com; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Re: Slug
 
In a message dated 6/16/2006 12:38:42 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
dfsiemensjr@juno.com writes:
There have been many attempts to make the Hebrew term refer to the
atmosphere or to space, rather than to connect it to ancient views. But
there is water above it, when it would have to be within it for the
water to be in clouds.
Dave,
 
can you point me to some papers that have dealt with this thoroughly. I
find your arguments unpersuasive but will withhold judgement until I
read something more thorough. They are unpersuasive because it seems
you are making an etymological fallacy -- that a word's meaning is
determined by its etymology. While /raquia^/ apparently does hail from
ANE cosmology in which the world is capped with a hard sphere, it seems
to me that the Bible authors did not mean for its usage to imply that.
Remember the ANE cosmologies must have been very ancient, but Moses was
writing at a relatively recent date. It's hard to imagine that the
Hebrews who depended on rain for agriculture (unlike the mesopotamians)
would really believe that clouds were coming through gates in a hard
sphere at such a late date, after they had sojourned in Egypt and become
the cosmopolitan people that they really were! The usage of phrases
like "open the floodgates of heaven" don't make your case because these
kinds of phrases are common in languages like English as holdovers from
ancient cosmologies and cannot tell us what the speaker actually
believes.
 
Every instance I can think of in the Bible shows that they connect the
"waters above" with the physical concept of ordinary clouds and ordinary
rain. Genesis 2 even says this explicitly in verse 6, where God cures
the first of the two problems: the first problem was no rain to make
wild plants grow, and the second problem was no man to make the
cultivated plants grow. So God cured the first problem by causing a mist
(cloud) to rise from the Earth and water the whole surface of the
ground, and He cured the second problem by making man. (This is the
correct reading of the text, YEC's notwithstanding.) So they clearly
understood that rain water comes up from the earth to form clouds, not
down through the windows of a hard dome.
 
I can provide other examples to show that the Hebrews saw rain as coming
from clouds within the atmosphere, and that the phrases about waters
above a solid dome were just sayings common in that day. Ps.104 is a
good example, noting that all 6 days are presented in that Psalm in the
same order as Genesis 1. In the place of Day 2 is a discussion of God
riding in the clouds and setting the pillars of his upper chambers in
the waters. This is a reference to the "waters above" from Genesis Day
2. But then in the place of Day 3 the psalmist discusses vegetation and
how God sends them rain from the "upper chambers" using the exact same
phrase that he used in regard to Day 2, clearly showing that he
understood the "waters above" to be just ordinary rain.
 
Also, the parallelism betw. Gen 1 and Gen 2 demonstrate this. I know
many on this list will deny the intentional parallelism between those
two chapters, but the best scholarship has successfully demonstrated it
-- the "waters above" in Gen 1 Day 2 and the rain clouds that cause wild
vegetation to grow in Gen 2 are talking about the same thing. It would
have been a huge omission if the origin of rain were not mentioned in
Gen 1. Rain was attributed by the Canaanites to Baal, and it would have
been a sorry polemic -- a sorry lesson in theology -- if it failed to
mention that Yahweh was the true creator of rain. But it does tell us
that in Genesis Day 2 when God is the one who separates the waters.
This draws from the language of the ANE cosmology, but there is no
reason to think that the physical interpretation of ANE cosmology was a
part of the package.
 
also, check out Ps 78:23, "Yet He commanded the clouds above, and opened
the doors of heaven." In the parallelism of this poetry, commanding
clouds is identified with the phrase about opening the doors of heaven.
At the time the psalmist wrote, they clearly understood that doors in
the raquia was just a phrase and that the true physics was in the clouds
releasing water.
 
Also, we see that "windows of heaven" had become a general, poetic
phrase used for more than just water,

II Ki 7:2
2 And the royal officer on whose hand the king was leaning answered the
man of God and said, "Behold, if the LORD should make windows in heaven,
could this thing be?" Then he said, "Behold you shall see it with your
own eyes, but you shall not eat of it."
(NAS)
 
Mal 3:10
10 "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food
in My house, and test Me now in this," says the LORD of hosts, "if I
will not open for you the windows of heaven, and pour out for you a
blessing until it overflows.
(NAS)
 
Nobody really believed that God would send money or food hurtling down
through doors in the raquia!
 
Of course there are like this many poetic places that use the ANE
phrases, such as Ps. 148:4 and Proverbs 8:24-31, but we can't tell from
poetry what they actually believed about the physics.
 
I think the problem in your argument -- why I find it unpersuasive -- is
that it is not nuanced enough to include the difference between common
sayings and the physical concepts attached to those sayings. Just
pointing out all the sayings in the text proves nothing. You have to
show whether the people of that time had a physical concept that agreed
with the historical origin of those sayings. Some of the examples I
mention above from the Bible clearly show that the Hebrews did NOT have
a physical concept that agreed with those ANE sayings. We have to
conclude that somewhere along the way, through the many thousands of
years since the time when the earliest Mesopotamians began to create
their cosmology and language until the time that Moses led the Jews out
from Egypt -- somewhere along the way the Jews had watched a rain cloud
form in the sky and noticed that there was no gate opened in the solid
dome. It is hard to believe that they wouldn't have done this, being
dependant on rain and thus tempted to worship Baal, as they were! When
you reflect on it, it really is harder for us to believe that the Jews
could, at that relatively recent date, still hold to the original ANE
cosmology in its entirety rather than to believe that they might have
gotten just a wee bit smarter.
 
You rightly point out the fallacy of those who try to claim that
/raquia^/ doesn't mean solid dome, when clearly it does. But those who
argue against this etymology for /raquia^/ are making the same
non-nuanced error as I see in your argument. It seems to me the only
right reading is that /raquia^/ really is a holdover from ANE cosmology
meaning solid dome, and is just one element of the ANE cosmology that
can be seen in the text. But it seems to me that the Jews weren't
endorsing that entire cosmology simply by using their language. I see
this as a divine accomodation to the scars of human language, not to
errant science.
 
By the way, the writer of Genesis 1 could have used on Day 4 the normal
word for sun (which is used 120 times in the OT), or the normal word for
moon (which is used some 20 times), but instead he chose to use a word
that is NEVER applied to those concepts anywhere in the entire remainder
of the Bible. The word he used has many applications in the Bible, most
or all of them phenomenological. He was only discussing the phenomena
of distinct lights in the sky, to fit the parallelism with Day 1, not
the ontology of the actual objects in the sky. Again, I would suggest
that the Hebrews were smarter than the credit we smug moderns give them,
and that they might have noticed the curved shadows on the moon and
concluded that it was a solid object, not a disk attached to a dome.
Since he was discussing lights on Days 1 and 4, not solid objects, he
avoided use of the words that he knew referred to the objects, and chose
to use a word that meant phenomena of lights, instead. There is no
teaching of cosmology in this.
 
As I said, however, I'll withold judgment until I can read a full paper
or two on the topic if you can point me to them.
 
God's blessings to you!
 
Phil Metzger

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Received on Fri Jun 16 12:19:51 2006